Monday Harvest – 23rd July 2012

This looks and feels like a winter harvest post to me, unsurprisingly really given we are currently smack bang in the middle of the coolest part of the year.  This week I seem to harvested lots of green, the occasional splash of colour and loads of rainbow chard:

I pulled quite a few chard plants this week to continuing preparing the tomato bed.  This lot went into some chard cakes made from  a recipe in Ottolenghi’s book Plenty.  I enjoyed them but I think they would work even better with some tweaks which I’ll make and hopefully one day post a recipe.  Incidently while I’m on the subject of chard I had a question from a reader: Are some chard (or silver beet) varieties  more nutritious than others – I had no idea, any one know?

Chard cakes were to have a sorrel sauce served with them – the recipe is also in the book.  I picked this sorrel:

and made the sauce, but it was incredibly bitter – inedibly so.  A time of year thing perhaps or maybe the idea was ill-conceived.  Which ever it was this basket load ended up down the sink.

More successful was a lime & coconut cake I made (with the help of Miss 5) with these limes, the last of the current crop:

Incidentally don’t let the summer dress and sunshine fool you it is still both cold and wintery here, albeit beautifully sunny of late.

As you may have noticed in the first photo and now in this one I have started bandicooting my potato crop.  Mark keeps posting his and I was getting really jealous… These are Dutch Creams and hopefully there are many more still in the pot these came from.

My final photo this week (I harvested loads of herbs but seem to have missed snapping them) is of broccoli with a chilli backdrop.  I’m really enjoying have fresh broccoli at the moment.  This harvest went into a version of this pasta dish but made with spaghetti.

And that’s it for me this week, but there are many more harvests to be had over at Daphne’s Dandelions.